A Womanist Perspective on Food & Pleasure by Julissa Nuñez

Everything that I know about pleasure I've learned through food first. The patient way I have to wait for Haitian mangoes in the summer and white raspberries in the fall when they're in season.

It has been a lesson in labor and reaping the harvest of your own hard work.

Food is also what has taught me about pain. It is a heal-all. Even when the world is ravaged and our hearts are devastated, sometimes just the thought of a good meal we know is to come is enough to alleviate. 

There are foods that we swear by in moments of crisis. For hangover cures, natural remedies or to ward away animals, spirits or otherwise. For me, it is my mother's hot chocolate. It will never not elevate my mood. She uses the Abuelita bars of Mexican chocolate and adds the rind of a green lime, fresh ginger, a stick of cinnamon and clove. She has forever ruined hot cocoa for me because if it doesn't have ginger, what are we really doing here? 

Food teaches me every time I cut an onion that all that you love will hurt you in return. But that kind of pain doesn't stop us from consuming, does it? Choosing love, despite, despite.

Pleasure in food is also how I learned about shame. When a boy in elementary school tried to "correct" the way I had eaten with my hands then. Or how my mother doesn't dare bring her purple potato salad outside the family because beets are a polarizing food. She told me that this potato salad, we only keep in here, our kitchen, because it's not "suitable" anywhere else because "other people won't like it. This is just for us." How many things about ourselves do we tuck away and hide like that? I had to convince my mother that it was okay to bring her potato salad filled with beets here. That it was okay for her thing that's different to exist here, beside all the others. 

Food is a lesson in shame, in patience, in waiting for the good things to come, something our communities of Uptown know all too well about. 

I can tell you that much of the food we get here in New York City comes from Upstate. And it travels through the Bronx first because it has to, on the highway but the trucks go to Manhattan first and Brooklyn, and arrives back to the Bronx last, especially my neck of the woods, the South Bronx.  How good do you think that produce is by the time it gets here?

When we talked about the place of food in this festival, it was about many things. The first being access. As of February of this year, 16.6% of residents in the Heights are food insecure and 32.3% are SNAP recipients. The act of feeding alone was in part to address food scarcity. Secondly, one of literal definitions of womanist that Alice Walker describes is "loves food and roundness..." We as womanists are universalists, meaning we are concerned about both the survival of everyone but moreover, that everyone has access to pleasure and leisure. Food is one of the few things that is both necessary for our survival but is also intrinsically tied with pleasure. 

So the purpose of our communal table was two-fold: to inspire connectivity as we break bread as well as address a basic need of our community. To embark on the work of healing, we must ensure that our bodies are sustained. Everyone is deserving of a good meal and filling our bodies, plus our spirits is how we honor our communities.  Making sure there is free nutritive food access within Washington Heights is our gesture of care. 

So I leave you with these two quotes from Audre Lorde which says:

"The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference."

Meaning that joy and pleasure are essential to how we continue to do the work we are called to do towards liberation.

And finally, "Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy."

The Washington Heighst Womanist Festival would like to thank Chef & Community Organizer, Sarah Grossman of Decameron Cafe for the amazing meal and full bodied experience of the post festival dinner. Our Savior’s Atonement Lutheran Church for Hosting the dinner in their beautiful gardens and GrowNYC and Nalasco Farms from graciously donating the abundance of food to this Harvest meal. We would also like to thank Jaquan Washington for his hands and heart in the kitchen and to Wilson Torres and the kids for being such amazing servers of our meal.

Photo Credit by Julissa Nuñez of Jujube Studios